In the late 90s, when I was maybe 15, 16 years old, my friend Amanda and I would traipse around the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico looking for haunted cemeteries and abandoned buildings. I'd recently inherited a lovely Canon film camera that belonged to my dad, and photographing these things had become my first real passion. In fact, I still have a beautiful mid-century television I ganked from a falling-down house SW of Cruces in 2002 or so, (undeniably breaking the urbex golden rule; never steal from the sites being explored, and leave everything as it was prior to arrival, but I was young and naive and my heart was aching to give the beautiful television a home)!

Las Cruces, 1999

Las Cruces, 2004

So what is it about urban exploration that's called to me for so much of my life? I think I've always loved the questions that come packaged with each place, the stories concocted by the things left behind. I know that every home I've ever explored was once lived in and loved by somebody. I know that there are beautiful and ugly and tragic and very human stories inside every wall that I've yearned to hear.

And sometimes, if you listen closely enough, you will.

After several years of putting my passions on hold for school, I've been eager to embrace them again, and on Christmas Eve, Mike and I decided to drive up to the SE corner of Wyoming for some rural urban exploring. We explored an old home, dubbed the Trophy House, and an old (and ridiculously creepy) missile silo. Time well spent, even if the temperature did drop to 30-something once the sun went down and I was sure my fingers were going to fall off. (Thanks for the challenge, Wyoming!)

Way WAY more of this to come in the future....
(click any photo to see it bigger, and credit's due to my partner, Mike, for snapping some beautiful shots of the missile silo.)

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I met Melissa, this red-lipped, beautifully inked, raven-haired woman less than 6 months ago. One day, nearly two months ago she confessed her love to me for Banksy’s balloon girl. She said she was dying to recreate it in a photograph for someone special to her, but wanted a snowy-filled backdrop. She wanted that vibrant red heart balloon to pop off a clean white setting.

My husband and I recently participated in an Atlas Obscura event to get a peek inside the Wonder View Tower in Genoa, Colorado. I'd actually never heard of this place before a friend sent me a link for the AO tour event only days prior to the meet-up. Needless to say, I was hooked and immediately bought tickets.

"Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world."

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.” ―Diane Setterfield

The trip was of course, wonderful, until the last 30 minutes of the drive home when Serenica's engine began stalling on us whenever we'd drop beneath a certain speed (hoping it's a minor fix!). Fortunately, after stalling out on several occasions and getting it restarted again, she died right inside our RV storage lot gate and wouldn't turn over.

I probably don't need to say here that I absolutely could not have predicted that it would have been 14 more months before we were ready to post the After shots, but I'm going to say it anyway: I had no idea how long this beast would actually take us to complete.

And then a woman appeared on the barren land, with seeds in her teeth, and each limb a root in search of earth to plant themselves. And then a woman appeared on the barren land, and not from the rib of any man, and not for his pleasure or to come to his aid, for without woman, there is no life, and there is no man.